VP8 and MPEG LA (WebM blog)

Google and the MPEG Licensing Authority have announced an agreement that will stop MPEG LA from creating a patent pool around the VP8 video codec, the WebM blog reports. VP8 is part of the royalty-free WebM media file format; MPEG LA has been threatening to create a patent pool to change the "royalty-free" part. "The arrangement with MPEG LA and 11 patent owners grants a license to Google and allows Google to sublicense any techniques that may be essential to VP8 and are owned by the patent owners; we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis. The techniques may be used in any VP8 product, whether developed by Google or a third party or based on Google's libvpx implementation or a third-party implementation of the VP8 data format specification. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec."

Comments (49 posted)